In NLP, models trained via Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) often exploit spurious correlations, such as dialectal markers, at the expense of robust linguistic features, thereby degrading their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) aims to suppress such shortcuts by identifying predictive relationships that remain stable across environments, but its practical utility for NLP remains debated. We use a causality-driven framework to evaluate IRM under three shortcut-generating mechanisms: label-generated features, confounding, and selection bias. Our results show that IRM successfully rejects shortcuts across the evaluated causal and anti-causal structures, including under limited environmental variation and increasing label noise. We then extend our analysis beyond controlled synthetic artifacts to two less constrained settings: gender-profession associations in Bias in Bios and semantically loaded actor-name shortcuts in ActorCorr. These experiments show that invariant learning can mitigate more realistic textual shortcuts, while semantically meaningful features require careful calibration of the invariance penalty.
Recent video world models allow users to explore generated environments through camera navigation. Continuous hand motion provides a fine-grained action channel for interacting with the people and objects encountered during exploration. We present TouchéWorld, a framework that integrates gesture-driven interaction into a camera-controlled video world model. Given an initial image and a scene-description prompt, the model generates video conditioned on temporally aligned camera and hand controls. We construct joint camera--hand training data from heterogeneous egocentric videos through annotation completion, consistency-based filtering, and temporal alignment. Building on a pretrained camera-controlled world model, we combine spatial hand-skeleton conditioning with numerical hand-motion features through parameter-efficient adaptation. Causal adaptation and few-step distillation support chunk-level online generation, allowing users to update their controls based on generated visual feedback. We further introduce TouchéBench to evaluate hand-motion following, camera--hand coordination, online interaction, and object response. Together, these components establish a framework for studying continuous exploration and hand-driven interaction within generative worlds.